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Steel | Movie | Out of Place

Work on writing our movie Steel (working title) is continuing. The script is coming along with my writing and directing partner, Betty Riggs. It’s a movie set in the early 1900’s during the technology revolution that lead to affordable automobiles and all of the changes and upheavals to society that ensued.

And it’s similar to what will likely happen during the next 20 years as robotics and automation take over millions of jobs. How will people earn a living? This is a real debate that’s happening in people’s homes right now. It’s also a debate that organizations such as the World Economic Forum are having.

Will science and engineering invent the next big thing that creates new jobs? The biotechnology, space, and robotics industries hold promise. Or will there be a massive revolution? What part should governments play?

These are the big picture questions that shape our movie.

But at its core, our story is about the relationship between a father and his son. And the relationship between the son and an unlikely friend.

One of the keys to our story is the idea of looking at the same instant in time across generations of families. In our case, it’s three generations of families spanning from the 1920s to the 2050s (approximately). The past and present are relatively easy to research and understand. But what does the future hold? That’s an important question from the big picture view of our movie and because two of our characters reside in the future. We’re working on research from many different angles. Society, economics, and technology are the obvious areas. But as Seth Godin pointed out in his TED talk from over a decade ago: “We’re now in the fashion business no matter what we do for a living. The rest of us need to figure out how to think that way.”

And with Seth’s words of wisdom in mind, four of us came together in Michigan to think about how one of our characters would look thirty to fifty years from now.

The photographs you see here are from a series called Steel | Out of Place. They are the result of our team’s work and will inspire the story of this particular character. How would this character feel if she suddenly found herself living in America today. Or in the 1920’s?